Monday, 30 April 2007

Overview of PhpED 5.0

Richard Davey in CorePHP gives you his views on the PHP IDE PhpED 5.0. He endeavors to provide answers to 'Are the new features worth the upgrade fee?'

He divides his viewpoints into different sections. In the first section, he delves into code folding. This version supports nifty code folding, which performs and consists of separate functions. Some functions are controlling the colors used for the folded areas, the line numbers in the gutter change to reflect the folded areas like folding PHP tags, comments, classes, methods and functions. Richard points out a drawback that this version does not remember folded functions when you close the PHP file and re-open it.

He says the aesthetics appeal has been worked upon in this new version. The icons have all been replaced with visually compatible versions. The new program icon is improved. This helps when especially if you are running Windows Vista.

The added packages with this version are:

• Nu Coder: this version builds support for their PHP Encoder Nu-Coder directly into the IDE.
• DB Wizard: the Database Form Wizard helps you in creating a set of PHP scripts that can perform CRUD functions on a given database table.
• Mozilla Embedded: version 5 comes with an embedded version of Mozilla. If you need to debug a heavily Mozilla based site then this is useful, he says.

• Subversion support: version 5 needs native SVN support. He tells you to get the support by setting up your own macros and using the context menus on files.
• CVS Improvements: Richard wants to see he ability to create a CVS toolbar, so you can checkout / add / edit / diff files instantly, without having to right-click a file to do it. He thinks it's vitally important they give you the ability to over-ride the CVS diff operation and specify your own third party diff tool such as Windiff or Araxis Merge. He feels that they should be seriously considering the more 'power user' features such as extended compare / diff / merge features seriously.
• Local/Staging/Live: he wants a function that will help to define two sets of publishing accounts in a Project properties. These two sets are a staging server and a live server. This helps to toggle which server files they are saved to. Additionally it helps to keep a track of which files were modified both locally, on staging and on live, so you can batch between the three.
• Search and Replace: he says that the search/replace text is woefully lacking here in this version. Though this version has got regexp support, 'replace in all open files', 'replace in directories' with full recursion and 'whole words only' but he says that the area in which to enter the search/replace text is not equipped.